Teaching game programming using XNA: what works and what doesn't
James K. Harris · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2011
In 2006, Microsoft became the first large gaming company to offer free of charge a professional development toolset for game programming called XNA. The pre-release version came out in March of 2006, and was followed by versions two, three, and four in 2007, 2008, and 2010 respectively [7]. XNA provides the ability to program directly on the graphics processing unit (GPU) using High Level Shader Language (HLSL). XNA also has a plug-in for Visual Studio that provides extensions to C# for developing games that run on the Xbox 360. In this paper, experiences learned while teaching game programming at the undergraduate junior/senior level in a CS Department using XNA 3.0 are related. This paper should be of interest to any computing instructors who are thinking about incorporating game programming into their curriculum.